Is Facebook "Like" button useful for small sites?

What are the effects of having a Facebook "Like!" button on your page, if you are a small site?

What are the benefits of it, and possible disadvantages of the Facebook Like button?

What effect does it have on promotion?

I'm curious about this too. I had a similar question here, with some nice answers: http://www.brightjourney.com/q/using-facebook-like-button-beneficial-business.

Using my relatively novice experience of the Facebook Like button, here's what I would say:

Advantages:

• If someone Likes one of your articles (or any particular piece of content), there's a chance that persons' friends will see it in the News Feed and click on the link as well.
  
  • To me, this means the title of your article (or the text you use in the Like button) must be catchy enough for a person to click through, which may counter typical SEO advice.


• You start to have an idea of which articles your audience really enjoys.

• There's no way yet to aggregate any comments people make on Facebook about your articles (though the service Disqus is apparently working on this).
• There's a slight technical impact. One way to implement the Like button requires using an iframe, which can adversely effect the rendering of your page slightly.
  
  • An alternate way to implement the Like button requires knowledge of JavaScript, which may require development resources, if you're not familiar with JavaScript. There's also a slight performance impact for the extra .JS file and Like button's images, though that load is smaller than using an iframe.


• Potential UI impact; perhaps some of your readers won't like the extra clutter on the page, though I don't think many will mind.

So far, overall, I think it's worth implementing and testing for a while. The disadvantages aren't significant (in my mind, at least) and the advantages could be great. I'd be curious about what others here have to say though. This is just from my meager experience thus far.

At a minimum, I would ensure you have a Facebook page for your business (previously known as a fan page). Then, you can add a "Like" button that links to your Facebook page. The advantage is that as you get more people as fans/friends of your page (and thereby your business), you're building your reach.

For an example, you can see how I do it at http://onstartups.com. I have two kinds of like buttons. One for the "site" (which connects to http://facebook.com/onstartups ) and one for individual blog posts so that people can share them with your Facebook friends. Works pretty well.

Mike did an excellent job describing the advantages and disadvantages of the Facebook Like button. Here's an article that discusses 8 of Facebook's recent social plugins for your site, including the like button.

I still prefer the older share button over the new like button because I think the way the share button displays the information on someone's Facebook news feed makes it more clickable. The advantage of the like button over the share button is that the like button is a lot quicker to use for the reader, so it has the potential of being used more often than the share button.

My recommendation would be to use the share button on each post along with the Facebook Like Box (discussed in the article I linked to above) through out your site. Also, check out that article, you may discover another plugin that works for you.